Many organizations have developed extensive forms for desktop computers to support the functions of the organizations. For example, medical service providers have developed and use forms to support virtually every aspect of medical services, including forms to support patient registration, medical record-keeping, insurance claim processing, inventory control, appointment scheduling, and so on. Many products are available to facilitate the process of creating a form for a desktop computer. One popular forms development tool is InfoPath by Microsoft Corporation. An organization can use a forms development tool to generate forms that include various form controls, such as radio buttons, textboxes, and drop-down lists. The forms development tools may allow validation and allow an organization to provide business logic to be performed as a user interacts with the form. The forms development tools also allow rules and conditional formatting to guide the user in completing a form, including the ability to show or hide optional form sections based on information entered. The forms development tools also allow forms to access various data sources, such as a database server or a web service provider.
After a form is created, forms development tools create a forms file that contains the information needed to run the form on virtually any desktop computer. For example, InfoPath creates a forms file in an XSN format that contains a manifest file, a view file, a template file, and a schema definition file. The manifest file contains a listing of all other files in the forms file and several other details including metadata, information on toolbars and menus associated with each view, information on external data sources, and error messages. A view file is an eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (“XSLT”) transform that presents an editable view of a portion of data in an eXtensible Markup Language (“XML”) format. Each view file accepts XML data as input and produces an output format similar to a HyperText Markup Language (“HTML”) format. The schema file is an XML Schema Definition (“XSD”) file that defines the XML format of the XML data that can be processed by the view file. If the XML data does not conform to the schema, the view file will not process the form. The template file contains initial data for the form in XML format. A forms file may also include a script file that contains scripts specified by the form developer for performing business logic and other validation.
The workforces of organizations are increasingly using mobile devices (e.g., smart phones and PDAs) to collect and access the data of the organization. For example, a medical service provider may carry a handheld device to collect physiological information about the patient. Unfortunately, mobile devices may not have the software to directly execute forms generated for a desktop computer, may not have the computation power to effectively process the forms, and may not be able to effectively display such forms on their small screens. It can be very expensive, however, to port desktop forms to mobile devices. It is expensive to support the manpower to develop and maintain the forms for the mobile devices and the infrastructure to support the deployment of such forms to the mobile devices.